The folk at Pyromaniacs publish a portion of a sermon by Charles Spurgeon every Sunday morning, and this week they’ve posted something that could have been written by William James or John Dewey, the founders of the Pragmatic philosophy that conservative evangelicals routinely denounce.
Depend upon it that the way to learn more is to use what you know; and, moreover, the way to learn a truth thoroughly is to learn it experimentally. You know a doctrine beyond all fear of contradiction when you have proved it for yourself by personal test and trial.
This is the fundamental insight that gave rise to James’ “radical empiricism” and Dewey’s Instrumentalism: You know what is true by analyzing lived experience, instead of counting on stuff made-up out of thin air by delusional Bronze Age goatherders. Ideas are tools that we test and use to learn more and further refine how we live in the world.